Major SVODs upped the amount of unique sports programming offered on streaming in early 2025, where Amazon’s Prime Video, Disney+ and Netflix together now account for 92% of all sports content available on five global services tracked by the Gracenote Data Hub. 

Per Gracenote, the amount of sports content on five global SVODs by program level – including Apple TV+, Disney+, Netflix, Paramount+ and Prime Video – increased 7.8 % from February to May (a three-month period Gracenote’s report refers to as “Q2”, although it doesn’t align with the calendar second quarter of April through June) over the prior period. As the report notes, that’s almost 2x the rate of movie title expansion and nearly one percentage point more than TV program expansions in the three-month time frame.

Note, Gracenote’s definition of sports programming includes not only live game action and competitions, but also sports related news, highlight shows, documentaries and docuseries. Gracenote’s Data Hub doesn’t break out numbers for whether a piece of content is a live game versus shoulder programming. 

As for actual program volume, Nielsen-owned metadata provider shared with StreamTV Insider that the 7.8% figure equates to an increase of 91 unique sports programs in the period, growing from 1,160 in the prior three months to reach a total of 1,251 sports programs across the five services in May.

And while unique program volume was up, data shows total volume of every program in the sports category (which could mean the same title overlapping on multiple services) decreased from about 12,800 in the prior quarter to roughly 12,700 in May, per Gracenote’s Q2 data hub.

As mentioned, looking just at the five major SVODs tracked, Prime Video, Disney+ and Netflix account for the vast lion’s share of sports content available  – together making up 92% of that 1,251 total. The share is fairly closely split among the three, although Prime Video notably leads the pack at 33.9%, followed by Disney+ distributing 31.7% and Netflix with a 26.4% share of sports programming offered among the five SVODs in the period.

However, it’s important to call out a couple of caveats to Gracenote’s Data Hub, which aims to offer a look at changes in SVOD content and libraries. The report is focused on global SVODs, so doesn’t include any program data, including sports, found on free ad-supported streaming (FAST) services like The Roku Channel or virtual pay TV providers like Fubo or YouTube TV, which also provide a variety of sports content on streaming. And it notably doesn’t include program data for major SVODs including Hulu, Max and Peacock – all of which have their own respective sports programming available but had been more US-focused.

As for why those three SVODs are excluded, when the Data Hub was created in November 2024, SVODs tracked needed to meet a threshold of operating in at least nine countries – which the five tracked do and those excluded did not. The Gracenote Data Hub covers content distributed by the five tracked SVODs in 28 countries, although they don’t all operate in the same ones.

And although Gracenote data shows most major streamers are expanding their respective pools of sports programming, there’s plenty of room to go as the category still accounts for only a tiny proportion of overall content available on the five tracked SVODs – representing just 1.3% of all programs.

Breaking down the individual services tracked, Apple TV+ and Netflix saw the largest percentage increases in sports content – although for some it could be a matter of starting with less than a major ramp up in quantity. 

Here’s Gracenote data showing how much each service increased (or decreased) their available sports content by from February to May compared to the prior tracked period:

Apple TV+:  sports programming up 25%

Disney+ : up 4.1%

Netflix: up 22.1%

Prime Video: up 5%

Paramount+:  Notably Paramount+ was the only service among those in Gracenote’s report that decreased the amount of available sports content on its service, down 8.7% compared to the prior three-month period.

As you can see from above, Netflix and Apple TV+ saw much larger percent jumps for their available sports programming than the other services tracked – although sports represented the largest content category expansions across all five providers except Paramount+ in the period.

For Netflix, it aligns more with the streamer’s distribution of more than quarter (26.4%) of sports programming offered by the five providers, as well as with the SVOD giant’s pole position in expanding content overall in Gracenote’s Q2 tracking   – which for Netflix in total was up 18.2% (including up 21.9% for TV programming and 16.1% for movies). That contrasts to only low single-digit percentage increases in overall content for each of the other services, including Apple TV+.

Netflix over the past year has been adding more live events and sports programming to its lineup. For example, in addition to picking up live NFL Christmas Day games last year, in January it kicked off a 10-year deal with WWE that brought live event wrestling entertainment to the platform. However, as executives have suggested before, a focus for the SVOD giant is the entertainment and storytelling of sports (alongside an “eventized” live programming strategy), and according to Gracenote  the majority of new sports programming added to Netflix in the period is documentary, highlights and talk-focused.  Also known as non-event based programming, this type of sports content accounted for a 45.6% increase in Netflix’s unique sports titles since the Gracenote Data Hub’s last update.

But for Apple TV+, the sports programming expansion was outsized and primarily driven by live events and games. Per the Gracenote team events or games were up more than 200% from February to May, where it’s relationships with and deals for MLS and MLB programming factor in.

Still, in the period Apple TV+ distributed just 1.6% of the sports programs offered by the five providers, and overall expanded total content on its service by only 3.7%. And for Apple TV+ the double-digit percent increases for sports content might be less reflective of the service adding a lot more quantity than starting with a smaller sports library, where, since the SVODs catalog is relatively small, adding even a small amount of incremental content can have an outsized effect on the percent change. 

As for the decline at Paramount, per Gracenote data, the amount of team sports games on Paramount+ dipped about 6% from February to May, while the amount of sports episodes on the service dropped more than 30% over the same period.

But with live sports serving as one of the remaining collective and appointment TV experiences, most streamers appear keen to bolster libraries with sports content to engage and retain fans (including those younger viewers) and attract advertiser investment.

And Prime Video is among those poised to get more live sports content in the upcoming season, after last year scoring NBA rights as part of an 11-year deal, alongside Disney and Comcast’s NBCUniversal.